marc wilhelm | game maker

Let me start by saying, I am not a fan of severe silos. Making games is just one thing I am interested in, and it happens to be the case that I have made a career of it. As games have evolved in the past twenty years, the prevalence of specialization has only increased, making it difficult for us "weirdos" - those who have the audacity and explorative nature to wander and expand our knowledge and explore a lot of things. This is especially true when working in a traditional development studio where, more and more, you are expected to be working within a specialization-of-your-specialization-of-your-discipline.

my start in games

When I made it a goal to build a career in the field of game development, I had a clear love for console games, and fair amount of training as a visual artist. In addition to improving my traditional art skills, I needed the specialized software knowledge required for an entry level position as a game artist. Despite that, in my heart, I wanted to be a game designer, I didn’t have any experience and there were no game design programs in my area. It was easier for me to begin a career in games as a game artist. Getting an entry level position in the game industry is challenging on its own; switching from art to design required, patience, extra work, and most importantly, the right mentoring.

While the “for-profit” non-regionally accredited art school I chose had its downsides, it was in my home state and enabled me to learn the basics of what I needed to start a career. A few key individuals in that institution made it worthwhile and I fulfilled my entry level career goals.

By far the most valuable lessons a good program teaches for a creative technology career are:

Learn the current industry standard software to understand the conventions, commonalities, and patterns of your field’s computer software and hardware - the user interfaces of new tools is usually patterned off of old ones (to make it easier for professionals to adopt to it - see they’re meeting us half-way!)

Learn to recognize the value of non-specialized or general knowledge outside of your immediate field for a broader understanding of your personal potential. Broad knowledge and self-knowledge are essential for healthy growth, enlightenment and competent collaboration.

Learning is as essential to your career, as breathing is essential to your body, if you stop, it dies.

3D Studio Max was the standard authoring software that my first studio, and the vast majority of the game industry utilized this tool. However, a year into my full-time position though, the studio and a good portion of the game industry switched from Max to the now dominant tool Maya, and so the lessons outlined earlier came to bear. Those who didn't want to learn or resisted the need to migrate to the new tool, had to find other work, but most of us took the opportunity to build our skills and learn Maya. We had been prepared to expect to have to learn new software frequently throughout our careers and this was just a natural part of the industry’s evolution.

You do your best work when you are passionate about the work you do.

After a few years, the thrill of modeling and texturing props such as chairs, tables, bushes, trees, interior / exterior elements on six different projects started to wane. Continuing as a prop modeler was slowly becoming less interesting to me, and I was getting restless. Being a game artist while dreaming of being a game designer wasn’t impossible, but it was less-than-inspiring the more I did it. I assume it felt like an aspiring writer/ director would feel, stuck in the role of a stage prop artist for production after production of other people’s scripts.

I was delighted when I was occasionally asked to do world building (which is modeling levels on top of “white-boxed” 3D layouts from the level designer.) These opportunities led me to see the potential to find fulfillment through a switch from game artist to level design. I hadn’t spent too much time in the level editor, other than to test out how the models looked in the game, but if I could use Maya, I could learn a level editor.

mentoring for support and encouragement

My mentor/ producer, Stephen met alone with each team member once a week to discuss the project, my tasks, etc. In a one-on-one meeting with him, I told him that I was getting kind of bored with prop modeling. He asked me what I would rather do, and I said that I was interested in exploring the role of Level Designer. He agreed that some of the skills of level design were adjacent to the world building modeling I was doing on previous projects, but level design was a lot more than just creating the shape of an environment. The scripting and the user-centered design skills needed to be a good level designer would require time and practice for me to acquire.

There were a lot of ways he could have reacted to my honest expression of job dissatisfaction. He could have told me to stop whining and just fulfill the job requirements of my role, or he could have said that if I wasn’t happy, to look for another job. Instead, he asked me what ideas I had that could enable me to become qualified to start working in the role of Level Designer on the team. I thought about it and mentioned a few ideas, and he said, “Ok, next time we meet, tell me what you need to move into that role, and I will help you.”

It is important to note that I am generally frank in sharing my feelings. Sometimes, I am candid to a fault. Telling your mentor, who is also your boss, that you are feeling stuck in your job, can be a risk. For this to be the right approach without having to update your portfolio and polish your resume, requires the right circumstances and a healthy work-relationship. If you do not have this good-fortune, sometimes changing teams or even studios is the right option.

In my case, it worked out for both my team and me, for many reasons:

I had proved myself on many projects in my position as game artist

My supervisor/mentor and I had weekly "one on one" meetings to foster mutual respect

The project was about to take a break for a re-boot

Other team members were willing to help

be humble and patient and look for the opportunity

Just because you are good, you should not expect to perform a career pivot on demand. For that matter, never demand anything- just ask. Most importantly, be someone that people want to help and work with - this is where the soft-skills, self-awareness and an awareness of project circumstances come into play. Hopefully, you are at a good studio where the conditions are right for you to grow and evolve as time goes on. It is only natural that creative people will get bored and need fulfillment from new challenges.

With my mentor’s encouragement and guidance, l created a series of goals to allow me to acquire the skills I needed to become an acting junior level designer on my team. First, I had to improve my knowledge in the level editing tool and build knowledge about the scripting method it employed. There was a fair amount of documentation considering we were using a proprietary game engine on the current project. Since there was a lot of documentation and I spent the winter break on my own time, learning the level editor. I invested my own time into this endeavor which demonstrated my drive, and I think helped justified the role pivot to the studio leadership.

Once I had demonstrated competency with the level editor, he suggested I ask a level designer on the team, Aaron if he would be willing to help by occasionally looking over my work. I don’t know if he had prepared him for this request, but Aaron enthusiastically agreed to be a part of my role exploration- this mentoring was an important part of his growth as well. (Good mentorship programs don’t just help the mentees, everyone benefits from such a system.) From time to time I would send Aaron a link to my level build or have him over to my cubicle to play through the level and give me feedback. He was very encouraging, but also made excellent observations about my faults.

After a few weeks, my producer told me that our lead level designer, Jason, had a level planned for the game that was already sketched out on paper that they would like me to “white-box” in an editor. This opportunity was the moment I started to move from artist to designer. I was still responsible for a fair amount of Maya modeling in addition to my level design, but it was an incredible opportunity, and it only worked because my studio had the structure in place to enable such a possibility and the right people to make it happen. I don't think I am particularly special, I'm just tend to find success requires being a bit of an opportunist and I am an opportunist who took advantage of the right circumstances to make a career pivot that worked out for both sides.

in conclusion

Good studios realize that their creative teams are made up of diverse individuals, with diverse interests, skills, and career goals. Communicating with a person frequently, and in a sincere and personal way is essential to acquiring and retaining the best people, and is in the best interests of all parties involved. For a studio to mature, it is critical to creating the most fulfilling environment for individuals and teams to work. If you are at a good studio, and have a good mentor structure, it is possible to change development roles, but you must build the right relationships, procure the right skills and wait for the right time.

New game development students are usually so excited to have the opportunity to make their own games, that they fail to see the importance of understanding the tastes of an audience unlike them. We need to understand that as connoisseurs of games, developers are unusual because we live and breathe games almost everyday, and our perspective is not the same as most players.

In a way, casual players are akin to "muggles" - to borrow the term from a popular series of books about a wizard with glasses and a lightning bolt scar on his forehead. Many long-standing communication schemes, while intuitive to gamers, may be enigmatic to casual players.

Zen Buddhism is about much more than just acknowledging and celebrating contradictions, but, the word "zen" is often used as a shorthand for a mindset that accepts contradiction. It celebrates the potential for balance through discord. What does this definition of "zen" have to do with game design?

Because, humans

Games are made by humans and nearly as likely to be played by humans. Because of this, games are a reflection of our reality. How we make games and how we perceive the experience of playing them is tied to our perceptions. A game design “practice” is a reflection of a game designer’s reality. The most challenging problems we face in fostering a healthy and productive game design practice, relate to resolving contradictions and general “imbalance” through unfiltered self-reflection, awareness and mindfulness in pursuit of the “middle path.”

When analyzing our designs as they are developed - from ideation to implementation and testing, we continually strive to seek the truth, obscured by a multitude of inherent barriers. We must develop skills and strategies to allow us, as game designers, to properly perceive the meaning behind the massive amount of information that comes from the internal and external play-testing of our games.

Surprisingly often, apparent design conflicts or problems are seen as:

Dichotomies

Contradictions

Opposites

Two sides of the same coin

Extremes

Often the best solutions them is:

To balance

To tune

To tweak

To pursue a “middle path”

To accept it - maybe even turn it into a feature

Focus, guidance, and experience are important methods for examining and building a skill-set to resolve complex issues. Certainly by concentrating in one area or on one task, we are able to produce the best game experience possible.

With the aid of an experienced practitioner on the path we seek, we can progress faster than learning everything on our own. Yet, there are some things, we can only learn if we experience them first-hand. The pursuit of a game design practice is no exception to these statements. To do anything well, it helps to consciously develop a practice around the ideas and concepts that enable us to develop methodologies, rituals and habits to procure for ourselves the most beneficial set of information possible.

It's not about you

Adopting multiple perspectives beyond our own is essential for making the hundreds (or thousands) of objective decisions that are necessary to make something that appeals to others. Yet at the same time, the individuals on the game design team must start with their own subjective sensibilities. The personal taste of the game's designer (who possibly may not formally hold this role) is the catalyst during the initial ideation phase, even if they are not the target audience. This often can continue through pre-production before the necessary step of getting their ideas into the hands, hearts and minds, of the actual intended audience of players.

These problems become most challenging when the target audience for the game is a mainstream commercial endeavor. For mass appeal, a professional game designer is challenged with the goal of providing fresh-yet-not-too-exotic an experience for the player audience, usually under the critical microscope of team-members, executives, publishers, funders, game reviewers, the press etc.) This kind of pressure can make it difficult to be truly objective.

Designers can’t help but bring their own subjective sensibilities to the table when it comes time to analyze feedback. For any feedback to be useful, it must be compiled, processed, parsed and analyzed to determine the best course of action in order to pursue the next step- to iterate or change the game to provide a better experience for the players and play-test it again. This is not all that dissimilar to the scientific method. For a game experience to be of the highest value, it requires a special balance during the play-testing phase between objectivity and creative taste.

Even the pros get this wrong

This is tricky stuff and I have seen some of the most seasoned game development veterans fumble by allowing their personal biases to dismiss (what others can see as) rather substantially obvious feedback from “well-run” play sessions. Yet, I have also seen 18 year-old first-year college students handle unexpected and difficult-to-accept play-test feedback with the highest level of grace and wisdom possible. Witnessing these instances, each came as a surprise and seem counter-intuitive.

Why does that happen? A simple explanation is that the veteran developer’s decades of experience, combined with a lack of disconnectedness from the work, can result in a level of hubris and denial which cause them to be dismissive of the feedback. The developer thought they knew better what the players wanted than what the players said they wanted. It is true that sometimes consumers don't "really" know what they want, especially if something completely innovative and new is presented to the market -but, not often. The over-confidence of a designer can result in poorer choices than an insecure novice who may be more open to feedback than dismissive - because they lack the confidence to allow their egos to insist that they know better than the play-test feedback.

I am intrigued by game design precisely because it is complex, multi-disciplinary and filled with lessons, skills and qualities that require us to resolve or accept many layers of contradictions. It is certainly not for the faint of heart.

For me, The "zen" of game design is enjoying the voyage as much as celebrating the arrival at the destination- having fun while tackle the dynamic, highly demanding, complex but rewarding set of riddles requires a disciplined mind, a light-hearted, yet persistent nature. This is just part of what is required to maintain and cultivate a successful game design practice.

At the core of my college's Game Studio program is a series of rigorous, project-based, interdisciplinary courses, which all four years of our degrees require. We cultivate an environment where talented, aspiring game artists, designers, programmers and producers can work together and develop new games. One of the many benefits of this approach is that it requires students to discover the value of building soft skills, not simply learning how to use professional software and apply development methods. Some students have a harder time than others for different reasons.

Even the most talented individuals often fall into the same trap. I call this trap the "cult of me."

"As hard as I try, I still don't seemed valued" - Inexperienced Beginner

It is obviously essential to improve yourself as an individual, and this endeavor leads to a lot of reflection and focus on one's own reputation and self-identity. As students focus on themselves, they often don't recognize the connection between being overly self-centered and the reputation they develop amongst their peers. While it is not unusual for students to make some time management misestimations or technical mistakes on their first couple of team projects, there are other factors that often affect their team-mates' opinions of them. After getting battered and bruised in postmortems, they endeavor to change their ways and make necessary corrections to their beginner-related shortcomings, yet some still fail to satisfy a key aspect of teamwork.

Even after they resolve common issues regarding executive skills (time-management or technical short-comings) often, despite putting forth a great deal of effort to prove themselves to their team-mates, they still have a reputation for not contributing enough to team. Some even get feedback that they seem disconcerned and disconnected from their team. This can, in worst cases, lead very talented individuals to either "give up" and just do the bare minimum and/or emotionally disengage from their team projects and focus on their own seperate endeavors and skill building (which only creates a vicious cycle.)

"What more can I possibly do to prove myself?" - Inexperienced Beginner

It is common for young, aspiring game-makers to engage in this trap of focusing so intently on this trap of focusing so intently on gathering information, skills, and identifying who they are and who they want to be, that they fail to realize one of the most beneficial things they can do. This is to stop focusing so intently on themselves, and instead, make efforts to reach out and offer to help others. When you help others you learn new skills and build important new connections that will improve your work and the skills of your team.

"Successful people are always looking for opportunities to help others. Unsuccessful people are always asking, 'What's in it for me?'" - Brian Tracy

If individuals take this idea to heart, and genuinely use it to adjust their approach, it will result in improving their reputation and instill a new healthy habit to their individual practice. By framing work not soleley as a way to advance as an individual, but as a way to lift all those around you, it demonstrates character and forms the basis of an effective leadership skill-set and will certainly result in being "one of the team." By helping others, you help yourself.

Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull shares fascinating and valuable insight about one of the most successful creative companies in history, Pixar. How the creative team had to intentionally iterate and reorganize itself to maximize benefit for the creative process and best serve the audience. It contains fascinating and insightful anecdotes about the creative process as it pertains to the business of entertainment, while elegantly telling the story of Pixar's evolution through the experiences of co-founder Ed Catmull.

If you or someone you love plans to, or already is, making a living by creating digital media, or anything creative and team related, this book is essential.

The most memorable moments of Creativity, Inc. are when Catmull points out that the creative process is almost inevitably messy. This personally confirms many of my experiences working with even the most successful creative team. Early on in my career as a game designer, I always assumed something was terribly wrong with the project, team or organization I was a part of. Sometimes there certainly were indeed problems, but even on the most well-prepared and organized endeavors, the process can feel more inefficient, indirect and haphazard than the idealized, smooth creative process that we somehow expect from the "making of" documentaries and books.

The creative team process, even when run by the best and the brightest, will rarely result in an amazing, perfect creation throughout from the beginning, but rather, may frequently seem uncontrollably messy and at times, even cataclysmic. But this doesn't necessarily have any reflection on what the final product will be at the end of the process- nor how it will be perceived by the audience. Even seasoned and brilliant pros like those at Pixar, start out with an initial pass at something that almost always, as Catmull puts it, completely "sucks." It is through the practice of careful, candid discussion with an established "Brain Trust" that they are able to turn those initial passes into something brilliant that ignites the spirit of millions and often wins awards. How the Pixar "brain trust" works and why it is so valuable is, for me, the most important and valuable insights in the book.

As most creatives, I find myself continually drawn to the lore of influential tech figures like Steve Jobs. In Creativity Inc., there is a great deal of material regarding Jobs; it is candid but gracious to the memory of the late Apple co-founder. Those of us interested in Jobs have access mounds of material about his mercurial launch, fall, rebirth and evolution into a respected leader in Apple and NEXT, but not nearly as much detail is documented regarding his close and apparently quite healthy relationship with the team at Pixar. It is interesting have a chance to see him through the lens of the articulate, fair-minded author (Catmull.)

The book is valuable, because it casts a light of optimism upon the challenge that so many creative teams are facing as we adapt to utilizing ever-evolving technologies, methods and marketplaces to create economically sustainable works of human expression. Creativity Inc. tells a great story of how technology and the human spirit combined to change animation forever and create some of the most memorable works of storytelling, the world has ever felt.

I chose to listen to it on Audible, but it is available in many forms.

Perhaps I'm not the target demographic for buying game consoles anymore. I admit, Steam, my iPad and iPhone are what I play games on the most over the past several months. I want to play games on my TV again, I really do, but here's how I feel about the big new game consoles.

This is video I took Saturday night at the "Night Games" public event at IndieCade of collaborative multiplayer game called Renga by wallFour. It is a real treat to watch. The game is controlled by hundredds of participants with laser pointers on a massive projection. Players upgrade a ship and outfit it with the necessary resources to withstand a threat from an enemy called the "Renga."

I'm in Culver City right now for the IndieCade 2012 conference. Yesterday, the day before the official conference began, an event called IndieXchange took place as an optional component offered for attendees who were also entrants of the IndieCade competition.

Indie Game the Movie is such a fantastic film because it touches on the humanity of creators. So many people who know little to nothing about games really connected with the movie and unanamously told me they have a much better understanding and greater appreciation for what being an indie game developer means.
After the screening it was oddly sublime to have an informed conversation with my parents about the intricacies of popular indie game culture such as the mental stability of Phil Fish and the expression of vulnerability through the exposed flesh of Meatboy, etc. They get it! The fact that I could bring them to see such a well crafted film that communicates so clearly the plight of creators like us is nothing short of a gift.

Isn't it interesting that Apple, almost as an afterthought, did a better job of creating a-gaming-platform-as-mobile-phone than equally well funded design teams who have actually tried doing that alone, nevermind making the best smartphone in the world? Remember the Nokia N-Gauge AKA the taco-phone? While delicious and crunchy, it didn't get the attention as a gaming platform that it did as the shape of a spicy, south-of-the-border treat.

This doesn't mean that the iPhone is the perfect smartphone or mobile gaming device. As I said in my last post, I miss the visceral experience of pressing physical buttons when playing especially tight and twitchy action games rather than tapping a small, faintly visible region on a cold slate of glass. Platformers like Vlambeer's Super Crate Box are many times less frustrating online with a keyboard. I haven't downloaded League of Evil 2 yet because I can't bring myself to finish the first League of Evil. I like platformers and the game is an acceptible one and I respect and admire the developers but platformers are just better with real buttons.

So what's the solution? Platformers and other action games on iOS need to make better use of the iPhone's interface to get me to play them more. How? I suspect that Super Meat Boy on the iOS will do a good job of tackling this if it comes out. If "Team Meat" can't overcome "the glass barrier" to make their most requested game, no one can.

Though I’ve worked professionally for over 10 years developing console and PC games at mainstream studios, this was to be my first “game jam” and anticipating the GGJ for several months, I was excited to challenge myself, meet and collaborate with a variety of developers and eventually get to share my very own game creation. I caught a cold a few days before the jam, but it wasn’t bad enough to keep me from participating. The jam location site I chose was at the University of Denver. Because most of the teams were already formed, I was planning to work alone but was open to the possibility that...

I'll be at the University of Denver location January 27th-29th competing in the Global Game Jam to make the best game based on a common theme along with teams from across the world. I've never participated in something like this before...sleeping under your desk, eating junk food, struggling under an impossible timeframe to make a game that doesn't suck...wait, that's just like mainstream games!

Regardless, I'm really looking forward this!

The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world's largest game jam event occurring annually in late January. GGJ brings together thousands of game enthusiasts participating through many local jams around the world. GGJ is a project of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA).